Seven Purple Tigers Feature

Seven Purple Tigers Feature und Interview

Seven Purple Tigers im Interview; Fotocredit: Lucía Palacio

Die Freiburger Indie-Rock Band Seven Purple Tigers veröffentlichte Ende Juli ihre neueste Single „Ignorance is Blitz“. Darin tragen sie ihr Indie-Gewand, wie sie es bereits auf ihrem 2019 erschienen selbstbenannten Album tun. Sie beleben das Genre neu und versuchen erst gar nicht krampfhaft einfach den Sound von vor zig Jahren einfach stur weiterzufahren. Sie agieren viel mehr als Band, die sich von diesem Genre inspirieren und tragen lassen. Das steht ihnen unglaublich gut! Seven Purple Tigers haben sich während der Pandemie eingeschlossen. Notgedrungen, mussten sie das ja auch. Sie wollten aber jede freie Sekunde nutzen, um neue Songs zu schreiben. Ihr Traum das Banddasein steht einfach über allem. Daher weht auch das Video zur Single. Es zeigt die Band beim intensiven Songwriting-Prozess und sie stellen nebenbei die eigentliche Story dar: Ein Paar das sich in einer Beziehung völlig verliert. In diese tauchen sie nur ein, weil sie große Einsamkeit verspüren. Bis sie merken, oh das passt gar nicht zwischen uns. Es kommt zur Trennung.

In a nutshell, could you introduce yourself to our readers, who is Seven Purple Tigers?

Seven Purple Tigers: We are an indie band currently based in Freiburg. Seven Purple Tigers are singer/guitarist Austin Horn and lead guitarist Philip Dyszy, along with bassist Sebastian Heieck and drummer Felix Schwer.

You recently released your new single „Ignorance Is Blitz“. How has the feedback been so far?

Seven Purple Tigers: The feedback has been great so far, both in articles and reviews about the song as well as in our comment sections, which we are super grateful for! We love the track so much ourselves so we‘re incredibly happy it resonates with people the same way it does for us.

Your song is about getting into a relationship because of loneliness, which then fails because you realize that you don’t fit together. Where do you think this desire comes from when one is lonely, that is then longingly and blindly searching?

Seven Purple Tigers: It‘s a very human thing, our desire to have someone around us we can come to for companionship, for affection. The importance of that has certainly been highlighted in the last few years (though the events described in the song happened well before lockdown). There are periods for us as people when being independent and on our own is necessary for personal growth or for our own health, but we are social animals and loneliness, or in this case romantic loneliness (which are definitely separate things), can really eat away at the soul when left for too long a time. When that happens, we search desperately for a partner in order to fill the void, and in that desperation we may become much less particular about who that may be. Red flags or obvious flaws get ignored in favor of having someone we can count on for that companionship and affection we need, whatever the consequences.

Can you please explain to us how the new single positions itself in the series of your previous tracks? To what extent does it stand out, join in or even continue a development?

Seven Purple Tigers: It certainly stands out in the way that we feel this is our best effort so far. It‘s the culmination of the learning process Phil and I have gone through over 5-plus years of working and writing together. We strived with all of the news songs to push our songwriting and production capabilities, and here we’ve achieved the best of both yet. There’s sort of two sides to what we do musically at the moment, one more rock-leaning and the other more pop-leaning; Blitz is the next step in what we were doing on the rock side with tracks like “Middle of Something”, and going back as far as “Messenger Pigeon”  from our debut album, while still incorporating a lot of new elements and skills we’ve picked up over the last few years, reflecting our changing tastes. The challenge with Blitz was to really push ourselves with writing interlocking guitar parts that were more challenging for us than other songs, and we really enjoy playing what we ended up with!

I find it amazing that you use the somewhat older model of the indie, but revive it with your stylistic devices. Why was this genre never dead for you?

Seven Purple Tigers: Thank you, that’s a wonderful appraisal! I guess we’re talking about more guitar-forward iterations of indie? Whether we’re talking about The Smiths, The Strokes or Arctic Monkeys, the thing that makes it undying, to us at least, is the focus on good songwriting above all things and the versatility of the guitar as an instrument. The guitar can be the lead focus just as much as it can be an atmospheric background texture, and indie bands have been pushing both extremes in incredible ways for decades. Phil and I are both guitarists at heart, but we don’t have this need to always be showcasing how cool our licks can be; as with our influences, the song is the most important thing. We’re more than happy to let the guitar sit back and relax on “One Night’s Promises”, dance in tandem with the organ on “Middle of Something”, and then give it center stage on “Ignorance is Blitz” – whatever suits the song is how and what we’ll play. Emotionally-grabbing, melodic beauty is another element to how music like the above mentioned stays relevant; consider Morrisey’s lines on “Still Ill” or Alex Turner’s on Last Shadow Puppets’ “My Mistakes Were Made For You.” That’s the stuff that gives us life and makes us want to do what we do. Keeping things in a somewhat modern context is also important to us, and the recording arts in 2021 are full of amazing, yet often subtle production techniques that can add something very special to music regardless of genre. We try to take that and work it in to our production at the highest level we can achieve despite being entirely independent.

„The challenge with Blitz was to really push ourselves with writing interlocking guitar parts that were more challenging for us than other songs, and we really enjoy playing what we ended up with!“

You used the pandemic to work on your new album. During the production, were you also driven by the deep desire to present the songs live again in a pandemic-free world?

Seven Purple Tigers: Live performance is our favorite part of being musicians, so absolutely! The lack of playing live was sort of a double edged sword with lockdown; since we didn’t have gigs, we needn’t endlessly rehearse the old set and finally had the time (and a lot of it) to write, record and take things in a new direction, which is something we had been desiring for a long time at that point. That being said, every time we finished a new demo one of the first thoughts was always, “damn, this is gonna be awesome to play live!” Blitz especially was one we were itching to take out on stage. We finally got that opportunity in July this year, playing in Freiburg and getting to take all four new singles out for a spin along with some other new, unreleased material. We saved Blitz for the encore, and it was everything we were hoping it would be!

You now have your first live gigs behind you in what feels like an eternity. Can you still remember the first moments of your first concert, what was going through your head before and during the concert?

Seven Purple Tigers: Excitement, above all else. For both Phil and I’s first gig as an acoustic duo way back in Krakow to our first time out in Germany as a full-blown four-piece, we were nothing short of stoked to get on stage together and showcase our music. Both gigs were in bars we knew and loved and were attended mostly by a big crowd of friends to whom we were super proud to show our music, so there wasn’t any real nervousness. To be honest, we feel most confident and self-assured on stage than anywhere else in the world. There were definitely a few “oh shit, what were the lyrics/chords here?” moments for me during those first sets, but the feeling of being there surrounded by this massive sound is what we live for and made it a joy, growing pains and all.

What can we expect from you for the final spurt by the end of the year?

Seven Purple Tigers: We’re sealing ourselves back into our magical little decrepit hotel restaurant studio for the autumn and getting the ball rolling on the next batch of releases. We may have a little something planned for December, and then plan to release the bulk of it starting next spring.

 

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